Identifying emerging trends in recreational drug use; outcomes from the Psychonaut Web Mapping Project.

Background: This paper presents the outcomes of the 2-year European Union funded Psychonaut Web Mapping Project which aimed at developing and implementing an integrated web mapping system to promptly identify and learn about novel psychoactive substances (NPS; "legal highs") through the regular monitoring of the Internet.

Methods: More than 200 discussion forums, social media, online shops, websites and other Internet resources (e.g.

Drugs on the web; the Psychonaut 2002 EU project.

Purpose: Only a few formal assessments of websites with drug-related contents have been carried out. We aimed here at fostering collection and analysis of data from web pages related to information on consumption, manufacture and sales of psychoactive substances.

General Methods: An 8-language, two-engine, assessment of the information available in a purposeful sample of 1633 unique websites was carried out.

New trends in the cyber and street market of recreational drugs? The case of 2C-T-7 ('Blue Mystic').

2C-T-7 ('Blue Mystic'), an illicit compound which shows similarities with MDMA and other designer drugs, has been only occasionally identified in the EU, but discussion on the Internet between experimenters has recently grown significantly. We aimed at collecting together in a review the available information on 2C-T-7, both at the cyber and at the street market level. 2C-T-7 was first synthesized in 1986; its desired effects include both a sense of empathy and of well-being.